


Once upon a place

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-24
Updated: 2004-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1642031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nynaeve isn't a proper girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once upon a place

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Calliope

 

 

There are never enough sons in Emond's field.

This is a fact, told and told by even the best of the   
adults -- her father points them out, each by each,   
and she's to remember.

There are other facts, though, and sometimes it's  
a tangle. Because it starts with the one and leads   
to the other, and the other, and mostly she doesn't  
think about it unless it's net-mending day.

There are some -- "Cauthons," says her father in her   
mind -- who feel there's something more to fishing  
than merely dinner, and they craft their flies just   
so and spend hours and hours at the streams.

They bring home trout that shine and flicker like   
the first brushes of morning after a storm, and   
great, ugly, clawed beasts that taste of little but   
the seasonings they're cooked in -- "Some would   
have it a delicacy, Nynaeve, but where's the   
*use*?" says her father.

No use at all, she responds, in silence and her   
listening. But Cauthons are horse-traders and  
thieves and never go hungry.

Her father isn't here, just now, because the roof needs   
patching and she is neither tall enough nor balanced  
enough on her feet for it.

There's no help for it -- and this is a fact, too, she   
knows it -- because she's at That Age (this is how   
they all say it, as if there's a meaning behind it as  
hard and true and *fact* as the claws of a   
delicacy, instead of just the way she can't seem to  
keep her hair from being tangled into things and   
her feet from tripping) and, even though she won't  
be forever...

This, she can do. Her fingers are nimble enough   
at this that she always takes the netting   
somewhere private, somewhere (safe) away from  
the other women, who would look at the motions   
of her fingers and pull out the needles and the   
cloth and she is no good at *that*, at all.

She's not a proper girl, after all.

This, though...

There's a trick to it. The rounded stones can be   
plucked, the sharpened ones unwound -- and then  
she looks, and feels, and looks *again*, and then   
mends whether or not she *thinks* she has to,   
because her father says the worst holes are *always*  
the ones that shouldn't be there at all -- and then   
there are the *vines*.

She likes these best of all, in a way she can't really   
describe. Something like the feel of venison beneath  
her teeth, when the hunt was a good one. Something  
like that.

Mostly there's a feel to it, a *rhythm* almost like   
(the wind, a voice which isn't a voice at all whispers,   
the *wind*) her heart. Because sometimes the coils   
go this way, and sometimes they go *that* way,   
and her father had said, "Congars and Coplins, and   
who can tell them apart?" and laughed, and laughed   
harder when she'd frowned at him.

The Congars tend to be taller, after all.

"Look at you beetling up so fierce," he'd said, and   
brushed at her eyebrows. Whenever he does that,   
she thinks she must be like the barn cats, or even  
the feral ones.

She likes it when he does that.

But the *unwinding* is necessary, because even   
though the vines would strengthen the net, they   
would also make them catch the smaller things,   
the little things, and they will never be so hungry   
as all that.

Her mother said, and her father nodded, and   
looked toward the Mountains of Mist, as if to   
chase something back.

Nynaeve knows what it was. Sometimes it's on   
the wind, but mostly it's on the voices of the   
people her father says aren't worth much of   
anything at all.

The ones who say there's a reason for everything,   
from the way the winters just get longer every   
year, to the breakbone fever that hits and hits and  
*hits*, no matter what the Wisdom has to say   
about it, to the way that Emond's Field never has  
quite enough sons.

It seems to *her* that having a reason for   
everything wouldn't be so bad, but she thinks her   
father is right that there's something just a little   
(nasty) convenient about how the reasons are   
always so bad.

"Some will always go looking for those who're   
different enough to blame for something," he'd said,   
when the woods were loud and close around them   
with the thundering of birds, when the summer was  
just too noisy for quiet to be any use at all, even   
on the hunt. This is so -- there aren't many girls of   
an age with her, but the way they look at her   
muddy stockings and hard hands is enough to   
say --

It's enough.

Still, though, she wonders if saying something   
enough, no matter how silly, is enough to make it   
true.

She wonders, sometimes, when she winds and   
unwinds, when whatever quiet space she's chosen  
is quiet *enough* for her to almost taste the   
next breeze, and whatever message it brings, if  
the way her father turns away from the mountains  
might not be dangerous.

She wonders if the boys she knows might not be  
special like the fattest, stupidest sheep of the fall  
are special, as opposed to the sort of special that   
lets *their* sisters have *soft* hands.

Mostly, though, she has her repairs, and her   
lessons, and the woods, and the streams, and her  
father.

And also she's started to have *other* lessons, and  
her mother clucks her tongue about how Nynaeve   
is *never* going to learn anything she ought, but   
she does it very quietly, because the Wisdom   
doesn't *take* nonsense.

The Wisdom makes the messy tangle of her hair   
seem like something more fact that anything else,   
more *true*.

"And didn't your ma have hair just like yours when  
she was a girl? Well she *did*, and a mess it was  
when she fell in the -- but we were talking about   
*snakeroot*. Pay attention, girl!"

Mostly there's all of that, and she can't quite weave   
a net that will catch anything smaller than a   
delicacy, but she can mend them just fine.

This is a fact, a true thing and useful.

Just like her.

end.

 


End file.
